In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  ‘BEAR US LIKE THE TIME’

  From that same time comes Shakespeare’s last known work – another collaboration with Fletcher. The new piece was called The Two Noble Kinsmen, and was based on Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale – but maybe with a nod to Euripides, who had long been available in Latin translation. Chaucer was much admired by Shakespeare’s generation of writers: ‘I know not whether to marvel more,’ wrote Philip Sidney in his Defence of Poesie, ‘either that he in that misty time could see so clearly, or that we in this clear age walk so stumblingly after him.’ Since then, Shakespeare had taught his age how to walk.

  Was The Two Noble Kinsmen hastily written for the new theatre? In his prologue Fletcher mentions ‘Our late losses’ and suggests that there will be ‘better plays in the future’, as if to acknowledge that this one had been hastily cooked up. The theme is the ambiguous and irrational power of Eros, echoing earlier plays (especially A Midsummer Night’s Dream). In the nineteenth century, Thomas de Quincy thought the sections by Shakespeare the greatest poetry in English literature. Not all have agreed with him since, but even so, no one then or since could have written this – even if the language is so knotty that at times it obscures the meaning:

  O my petition was

  Set down in ice, which by hot grief uncandied

  Melts into drops; so sorrow wanting form

  Is press’d with deeper matter

  So what was the last stage verse he wrote? Prospero’s elegiac valediction, much as we would like to think so, may not be Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage and may not represent his state of mind towards the end of his life. It has even been suggested that the bitter satire Timon of Athens was the script left on his desk at the end. But a much more likely alternative is that the final speech of Theseus in The Two Noble Kinsmen is the last thing he wrote. Fittingly, it is an address to the inscrutable gods:

  Oh you heavenly charmers,

  What things you make of us! For what we lack

  We laugh, for what we have are sorry, still

  Are children in some kind. Let us be thankful

  For that which is, and with you leave disputes

  That are above our question. Let’s go off

  And bear us like the time.

  From his last plays we can see that Shakespeare remained interested and engaged in the ideas of his day, as one might expect from a man whose friends were in the artistic avant-garde, widely travelled and knowledgeable about foreign cultures. Shakespeare’s books were those of a professional writer of the Renaissance with wide interests in European humanism and a working knowledge of several languages – back in Stratford, we know that New Place had ‘a study of books’. So we can be sure that at the end of his life he could retire there to read: if, that is, his sight was still holding up, after years of writing by candlelight in the ordinaries of Bishopsgate and Southwark. Unfortunately, the time to read books, to supervise his landholdings and to cultivate his garden would be all too short.

  STATE OF MIND: THINKING OF DEATH

  In the new year of 1616 Shakespeare dictated the first draft of his will. He may have been prompted to do so by the imminent marriage of his younger daughter, the surviving twin Judith. But usually in those days people drew up their will when they felt they had not long to live, and while, at fifty-one, Shakespeare was not that old, his younger brothers were already dead and his own health may have been deteriorating. There is a tale of a fever brought on by a drinking session with the Warwickshire poet Michael Drayton and his old sparring partner Ben Jonson. Some have even suspected that Shakespeare had syphilis; this is not impossible, since he had lived the life of a single man in London for all those years, and there is an apparent reference to venereal disease at the end of the sonnets – the ‘strange maladies’ caught in his ‘hell of time’ in the late 1590s. Others have drawn attention to the signature, which could be regarded as shaky for a man of only middle age. Writer’s palsy? Were his eyes indeed going? Or had the tavern life in London taken its toll? Actors today are high on the list of ‘drinking professions’, and perhaps they were then, too. Consider the evidence: a life lived in theatres; the heavy consumption of ale as a normal part of the sixteenth-century diet; nights on his own in London for over twenty years; eating and drinking by himself; writing alone at night. It takes us back to the old tale that his death was brought on by drinking.

  It is not the fate of all great writers to end up disillusioned, of course; but not all of them reach middle age with equanimity. Tolstoy, at the same point in his life, had also lost a small son. His earlier novels had taken a cool, calm view of death, whether in war, on the scaffold, in poverty or on the estates of the rich. But when he reached the age of fifty this rationality left him, for he knew his own death was coming closer. He wrote to his brother, ‘It is time to die – that is not true. What is true is that there is nothing else to do in life but die. I feel it every instant. I am writing, I am working hard … but there is no happiness for me in any of it.’ Then, in a curious parallel with Shakespeare’s activities in this sphere, Tolstoy, already the owner of large estates, concluded that making futher land deals was the only way to prevent thoughts of death getting an intolerable grip on him. It was on a journey to finalize such a purchase, staying in a country inn, that he had a classic death dream in which his room became a tomb. ‘All told me the same story – there is nothing in life, nothing exists but death – and death should not be!’ Then he wrote that great exploration of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

  Was it like that for Shakespeare? A case could be made: the long decline in productivity; the late collaborations, which started even before he was fifty; then the continued compulsive purchasing of land and property that he had begun much earlier. Was all this an earthy substitute for his airy art? All through his career his keen intelligence had been concerned with the limitations of his art. In his sonnets he was obsessed with memorializing and with the possibilities of language while admitting the ultimate inadequacy of art, language and metaphor: ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on’; ‘The best in this kind are but shadows.’ In his last plays, especially in the tortured syntax of The Winter’s Tale, he had taken language as far as he could. The dense, clotted verses in the collaborations with Fletcher might suggest he had reached the point where it was not of interest to him to write more.

  Or was it not like this at all – did he just end his days happily in his garden among the rosebushes, his granddaughter Elizabeth laughing on her swing? As always, we search for clues, and impose on him what we will.

  FAMILY SCANDAL

  Early that spring, after the first draft of her father’s will had been prepared, Judith Shakespeare became caught up in a sex scandal. It was not the first unpleasantness involving the poet’s daughters. Three years earlier her sister Susanna had been slanderously accused of adultery and of being infected with gonorrhoea. That was all quickly dealt with to the Shakespeare family’s satisfaction; this time it would not be so easy.

  In February Judith married the vintner Thomas Quiney, son of John’s friend Richard, in Stratford. But a month later the couple were excommunicated for having married in Lent without a special licence. This was a huge public humiliation for the family. Then came the revelation that Quiney had got another woman, Margaret Wheeler, pregnant; she died in childbirth, along with her baby, at about the same time. Documents preserved in the archives of the ecclesiastical ‘bawdy courts’ in Maidstone, Kent, show that Thomas was then summoned to appear in his local church court on a charge of moral delinquency. On 26 March he duly confessed to ‘carnal copulation’ with the poor deceased woman. It’s like a scene from one of the plays: this, after all, is what Claudio is condemned for in Measure for Measure.

  It must have been a painful further humiliation for both Judith, now thirty-one and almost beyond marriageable age in those days, and her father, especially given his deep-rooted ambivalence about sex. The court imposed an embarrassingly public penance on Thomas, which t
he family managed to have commuted to a fine.

  This was the background to Shakespeare changing his will. The previous day he had brought in his lawyer, Francis Collins, from Warwick and altered it to protect Judith and to impose conditions on her husband. All this anxiety must have hit William hard. The latest signature on the will, some have thought, shows signs of illness. A tiny detail sticks out in the original document: in the line ‘whereof I have hereunto put my Seale’, the word ‘Seale’ is struck through and replaced by ‘hand’. In 1810 a ring was found in a field close to Holy Trinity churchyard. A beautiful, big, heavy gold signet ring, it was certainly Elizabethan, of the kind treasured by its owner. On it were entwined the initials WS. Had Shakespeare dropped his signet ring after Judith’s wedding a few weeks earlier?

  The ceremony had taken place in February, the coldest month of another very cold winter. He might well have been wearing gloves. He was perhaps already ill, and might have lost weight; the ring could have been loose. Outside the church, after the service, perhaps he took his gloves off to shake hands with an old acquaintance. The ring would easily have fallen, unnoticed, and been lost. Your seal is an emblem of yourself. To lose it is a blow.

  And still the slings and arrows continued to hit the family. Shakespeare’s brother-in-law William Hart, husband of his sister Joan, died and was buried on 17 April. ‘Nothing ’gainst Time’s scythe can make defence.’

  HIS WIFE ANNE: THE MYSTERY OF THE SECOND-BEST BED

  So it was during these crises that the poet made the final alterations to his will. There were gifts to many friends and neighbours; £10 to the poor of his home town; money to his old fellow actors in London, Hemmings, Burbage and Condell, with which to purchase remembrance rings. He faithfully remembered the old recusant friends and neighbours Hamnet Sadler and William Reynolds, and his godson William Walker. After the bequests to Judith, most of the estate went to Susanna and John Hall.

  But what about his wife? Anne had brought up their children, and must have looked after his business affairs in Stratford all these years as Tudor wives were expected to do. Yet we know next to nothing about her. Many husbands put words of affection for their spouses (‘my dear wife’) in their wills. But William’s is devoid of such phrases, and for Anne there is only a last-minute addition scribbled by his lawyer: ‘Item to my wife the second best bed…’

  A vast amount of ink has been spilt on these few words. Most wills of the day, it has to be said, are matter of fact, but in the desperate search for the poet’s feelings much has been read into this laconic bequest. Some interpret it as cruelty or hatred. Others have seen in it a discreet reference to the marriage bed, remembered sentimentally at the last minute, and specified over and above the one-third of his estate that fell to his widow as a matter of course. Recently a new theory has been argued from the minutiae of medieval English customary law: that on his deathbed William was making a tacit admission that he had been unfaithful in marriage and had broken their ‘bed vows’. In so dry a document it would be a metaphorical twist almost worthy of him; but this seems strained. The solution may well be altogether simpler, though not without its own poignancy.

  At the time of its alteration the will would have been read to Anne, who knew she would get her widow’s third portion and continue to live at New Place with her daughter and John Hall. So was it she who wished the bed to be specified? And if so, why? The answer lies, perhaps, in her father’s will. Back in 1581, the summer before she married William, her father made a curiously specific stipulation about two beds in her old home, Hewlands Farm in the village of Shottery: ‘Item, my will is that … the two joyned-beds in my parlor, shall continue and stand unremoved during the natural life or widowhood of Joan my wife and the natural life of Bartholomew my son, and John my son, and the longest liver of them.’

  The beds, then, were heirlooms; they meant something to the Hathaways. Their descendants lived in the house until the nineteenth century, and two late sixteenth-century ‘joyned beds’ (four-poster, framed beds) remain there today. But in the inventory of Anne’s brother Bartholomew in 1624, only one ‘joyned bed’ is mentioned. So the year after her father died, when she had married her teenage lover, had Anne brought one of the family’s ‘joyned beds’ from Hewlands Farm to Henley Street, but on condition that it should eventually go back to the family? If so, it would eventually need to be singled out in her husband’s will.

  This is only speculation, of course: the fact is that with the second-best bed, as with so much else, he left us a mystery. Tudor marriages were generally based on companionship and partnership, not on romantic love. But Shakespeare was a man who believed in the ideal of love, and for all we know, despite the beautiful boy and the broken ‘bed vow’, he loved Anne till the end and still felt as he had on their marriage day, that she had ‘sav’d my life’.

  ARS MORIENDI: THE ART OF DYING

  We have no idea what Shakespeare’s last illness was; presumably he was tended by his son-in-law Dr Hall. Unfortunately, only one of Hall’s two casebooks survives and it begins the next year, in 1617. Maybe the other will turn up one day and give us a bedside account of the poet’s last days, but until then we must imagine.

  When you knew you were dying you disposed of your goods, paid off your debts and readied your mind for the end. Tudor people prepared for death, and there was a plethora of selfhelp books available to guide them. Shakespeare had used one for Claudio’s famous speech in Measure for Measure.

  But what of Shakespeare himself? In his lifetime many of the things by which English people had lived their lives for so long had been swept away. The tiny, old-fashioned and provincial England of the mid-sixteenth century had been transformed out of recognition in terms of population, culture and world view; in the beginnings of colonization and empire; and even down to the homely detail of pewter on the table, consumer goods and all those chimneys. And, of course, a once-Catholic country was now a Protestant one. The role of his generation had been to live through, and to shape, a remarkable time.

  The idea that you play your part on the stage of history was a contemporary commonplace. In the 1560s’ English version of Thomas Mores Utopia there is a prophetic tract for the times expressed in those same guiding metaphors of the Tudor age:

  What part so ever you have taken upon you, play that as well as you can, and make the best of it: and do not therefore disturb and bring out of order the whole matter, because that another that is merrier and better cometh to your remembrance You must not forsake the ship in a Tempest, because you cannot rule and keep down the winds But you must with a crafty wile, and subtle train study and endeavour your self, as much as in you lieth, to handle the matter wittily and handsomely for the purpose, and that which you cannot turn to good, so order it that it be not very bad ….

  And wittily and handsomely Shakespeare had handled it. But what of his final allegiance when he died on 22 or 23 April 1616 in Stratford? In his greatest work he had dramatized the tensions of a world that had lost the comfort of religion. Whether he himself turned back to such comfort at the end – as people often do even now – we cannot know for certain, but the testimony of Richard Davies, a seventeenth-century Gloucestershire clergyman, is unequivocal: ‘William Shakespeare,’ he says, ‘dyed a papist.’

  Davies had no reason to lie, and plenty of reasons to know. He is not a primary source, but it would be incredible if such a story should have surfaced had the poet been a conforming Protestant. What the story means, of course, is another matter entirely. All we can say is that Davies had heard that the poet received the last rites from a priest according to the Catholic faith.

  His modern biographers have argued this case and others beside: an outward conformist but with inward regrets; a reverent agnostic; a humanist who found greatest solace in the pagans. But he was, after all, a man who drew on more than one tradition to animate the worlds of his imagination. Like many people who had lived through the Elizabethan age, he probably eschewed certainties and no lon
ger held any deep sectarian conviction. But he remained a Christian; the Bible was still his book; and from ‘incertainties which now crowned themselves assured’ it may be, as Davies records, that he was drawn to his childhood certainties at the end. And if he did go through that last ancient rite of passage on his deathbed, was it perhaps as much in loyalty to the past, to his parents and ancestors, and to the spirits of England, which to many of his generation had been ‘leased out like to a pelting farm’?

  His funeral took place at Holy Trinity, where his father and mother, his son Hamnet and other family members had all been buried. As a tithe holder, he was entitled, unlike them, to be buried inside the church. The inscription on his tomb, according to an early authority, was composed by him. It is the kind of doggerel he had written at the drop of a hat for friends and neighbours, the sort of old poetry of Christianity still to be seen on the guild chapel wall:

  Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare,

  To digg the dust encloased heare:

  Bleste be the man that spares thes stones,

  And curst be he that moves my bones.

  His wife, it was said, requested to be buried with him when her time came; but the curse proved stronger, and Anne was interred close to him near the altar, where their graves may be seen today, along with those of their daughters and their in-laws John Hall and Thomas Quiney. In the end the Shakespeare family made their way back from John Shakespeare’s troubles: New Place, old Clopton’s house, the landholdings at Welcombe and Bishopton, and a prime position in the place where Stratford folk had worshipped, and been buried, for 900 years.

  And what of Shakespeare’s works? To our eyes he had been shockingly negligent about the preservation and publication of his scripts. He is said to have disparaged the pretensions of Ben Jonson, who had already collected his ‘Workes’ into a grand folio volume (several contemporaries jokingly suggested that Jonson had forgotten the difference between ‘work’ and ‘play’). Unsettling as the thought is, he may not even have cared about his works being handed down. Instead it was his friends who published his plays in 1623, prefaced by these words: